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Why are there so many DLL's?

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WMD:
I did a search for *.dll on my c:/winnt directory.

1,931 files.  WTF?  Why does Windows keep so MANY of these damn things?  Also there were 481 in the "Common Files" directory.

Is this just classic MS bloatware?

anphanax:
A lot of them are Microsoft's, but also a lot of them are put there by other software.

A DLL is basically a compiled library of subroutines, and usually the functions contained in them are refered to as WinAPI. There are a lot of them (probably too many :\) because they are for the most part specialized, although somewhat repetitive and can be space wasters. (they can also be used for icon libraries and other similar things, since they they can hold resources, not that PE/NE Win32/Win16 EXEs can't)

IE (Taken From XP Pro Install):
SHELL32.DLL.......Common Shell API
COMDLG32.DLL......"Common Dialog (save, load, color selection, font selection, printer dialogs, etc)"
GDI32.DLL.........Graphics\Device Interaction
KERNEL32.DLL......OS Core\Base
USER32.DLL........Controls\Messaging\Interface
ADVAPI32.DLL......Registry I\O
UXTHEME.DLL.......XP Skinning
SHDOCVW.DLL.......Shell Document\Control
SHLWAPI.DLL.......Shell Light-Weight Utility Library
MSVCRT.DLL........Bunch of stuff for MSVC++ Runtime
NTDLL.DLL.........NT Layer (Used by Kernel32, see portable executable imports table)
BROWSEUI.DLL......Shell Browser UI
WSOCK32.DLL.......Windows Socket API
MSVBVM60.DLL......Visual Basic 6.0 Runtime
OLEAUT32.DLL......OLE 3.5 For NT/95 Automation
OLE32.DLL.........Microsoft OLE For Windows
OLEDLG.DLL........OLE 2.0 User Interface Support
MORICONS.DLL......WinNT\95 Setup Icon Resources Library (Where the QBASIC icon, and other old ms-dos icons live        )
etc..

Edit: Various grammer fixes. Original post didn't make much sense, sorry.

[ December 09, 2003: Message edited by: anphanax ]

skyman8081:
just to play a bit of devils advocate there are 10801 files that come up in a search for *.*o(.o and .so) in /usr on my gentoo install (granted it is a bit unfair, but devils advocate here, ok) so I think that you are being overly broad on this by just looking in C:\winnt, however yes windows is bloated. NT is a good start because of the new core.  BUT there is still old crap for win9x/win16 apps to still run (hopefully)

Refalm:
I think that there's a shortage of dll's. Microsoft should restore all dll's that weren't in Windows XP, but where in Windows ME, NT, 98, 95, 2000...

hm_murdock:
why are there so many DLL's what?

remember...

Ohhhhhh if it's plural it's just "D-L-L-s" but if it's a posessive it's "D-L-L-apostrophe-s"

scalawag

and another question... WHY IN THE NAME OF FUCK DO YOU CARE?!?! Jesus, sometimes I think you guys LOOK for stupid things to whine about.

HEY! THE "X" GRAPHIC IN THE CLOSE BOX IS 3 PIXELS WIDE, WHILE THE LITTLE BAR IN THE MINIMIZE BOX AND THE SQUARE IN THE ZOOM BOX ARE 2 PIXELS WIDE!! WINDOWS SUCKS!

I'm gonna go search for random filetypes on a computer. If there's a lot of them, then I'm going to come whine about it. HOW'S THAT?

[ December 10, 2003: Message edited by: evil fucking bastard jimmy james ]

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